Entertainment technology has evolved beyond recognition in a mere ten or fifteen years. New motion pictures are released into complicated and ever more calculated schemes of sequential availability to commercial theaters, rental operations and home theaters--the latter of which can bear startling resemblance to the former. Audio recordings known as "enhanced CDS" offer not only audio but multimedia video replication, and personal computers and televisions and their networks are individually evolving so that soon they may well be virtually indistinguishable. A wide array of online information and interaction tempts us, moreover, from opportunities as unsophisticated as the online equivalent of a group of teenagers sharing a party telephone line to those inherent in ineffable data banks pertaining to satellite photography, medicine and genetic engineering, just to name a few.
Beneath the most enhanced entertainment technology lies a troubling and largely unrecognized assumption, however. With some but minor exceptions, cutting edge entertainment technology is predicated upon the belief that its consumers prefer a largely passive role while the technological dazzle occupies the stage. Multimedia CD jukeboxes are a good example of this phenomenon--a pub or restaurant in which such a machine is installed is overtaken by a genial Wizard of Oz in which social activities, other than the tendering of adequate currency to the welcome sorcerer, take on secondary importance.
This is not to say that the entertainment industry requires passive participation--quite the contrary--just that the concomitant technology generally does. For example, the Karaoke machine in which prerecorded (or sequenced) orchestrations may be augmented by live vocals is at this writing barely taken seriously as an embodiment of entertainment technology, and customarily it is subjected to lighthearted scorn. Even with the newest theme park amusements the "ride" is generally passive. "Hot buttons" on click screens or touchscreens in multimedia interactive applications never seem to deliver the promised autonomy and volition with which such systems entice new users. On the other hand, where true active entertainment participation is maximized the technology tends to be minimal at this writing, such as is evident from the undying popularity of traditional pool or pinball competitions, or in electronic darts and their leagues, or old fashioned amusement park autobahns where the driver can actually (heavens!) steer the car. Consumers of up-to-the-minute elaborate entertainment technology are not today supposed to impose themselves too visibly, or too actively, into the mechanations of their experience.
Quite apart from the entertainment technology industries, sport and skill game leagues of all kinds are gaining in popularity in various settings. The aforementioned electronic darts leagues are immensely popular across a wide socioeconomic spectrum, and other games of skill organized into fee-for-entry leagues include but are not limited to chess, bowling, pool, miniature soccer, miniature hockey, and pinball and video games of skill. These leagues are operated separately from legal and less-than-legal gambling channels, such as those having to do with video poker, because the leagues sponsor games of skill only and proceeds are thus not distributed on the basis of chance. These leagues tend to be surprisingly conventional in their organization, solicitation, seasonal entry, execution and end-of season payout, possibly because the same individuals who value active participation in their leisure pursuits likewise tend to take an active role in the hands-on administration of traditionally organized amusement game and sports leagues.
Accordingly, a need remains for an improvement in entertainment technology in which some or all aspects of that technology, as well as other technologies, are redesigned directly to embrace participatory activities such as those of a sport or skill game league rather than merely the passive participation typical of entertainment technology heretofore.